Proskill Workwear Australia is an Australian-owned distributor of MASCOT workwear. They have been going for close to 20 years, and their whole business rests on one idea: workwear that is built properly lasts longer, so you buy less of it. We worked on this project with their General Manager, Chris Doolan.
The idea for a calculator wasn’t ours. Proskill already had one, and they already had the argument it was making. Our job was to build a version that did the job properly.
The argument the tool makes
Proskill’s pants cost more than the cheap alternative on the shelf. On a single invoice, that looks like a worse deal. Over three or four years, it isn’t. Better quality means fewer replacements, which means less money spent and less thrown away. That argument is hard to make in a sentence, and harder still to make to someone comparing two price tags. Numbers do it better than words.
The waste side matters as much as the money. It is part of why Proskill exists, not a nice extra to mention at the end. Every pair of work pants that gets replaced early takes 3,000 to 4,000 litres of water and around 15kg of CO2e to make, and then ends up in landfill. Buying half as many pairs halves all of it.
We also had evidence to work from. Chris gave us a report by Monash University students, based on a survey of 39 Proskill customers, which validated the durability claim. Customers reported their MASCOT gear lasting up to 5.7 times longer than other brands. The study hasn’t been peer reviewed, so rather than treat 5.7 as fact, we made the durability multiplier a slider the user can move. It’s honest, and it lets people find their own break-even point.
Two audiences, one tool
Proskill sells to sole traders buying a pair of pants and to large operations kitting out a whole crew. The calculator asks for the number of employees and the pants per employee, so it works either way. A plumber with one van and a company with 200 people both get an answer that reflects their situation.
Why it works
It’s immediate. You enter a few numbers and see the result straight away: dollars saved, kilos of CO2, litres of water, and pairs of pants kept out of landfill. No one has to be talked through a spreadsheet.
You can also ask for the full Impact Report as a PDF. Enter a name and email and it lands in your inbox in a format you can forward. That matters for the bigger accounts, where the person running the numbers is rarely the person who signs off on the purchase. It also gives Proskill a steady stream of qualified leads, from people who have already done the maths and liked the answer.
Alongside the results sits an AI-generated visual built around a real customer testimonial. It takes the key numbers and puts them in front of people in a way a table of figures can’t.
About the build
Because a calculator was already in place, the obvious route was to make an off-the-shelf plugin do the work. We tried. It got us part of the way, but it wasn’t flexible enough to handle the formula, the layout and the PDF report the way Proskill needed.
So we built a custom plugin instead. It does exactly what the brief called for, and the inputs, labels, rates and copy are all editable from the WordPress admin, so Proskill can update figures themselves as better data comes in. The structure is reusable, so the same plugin can power other calculators down the track.
Start to finish, it took less than 10 days.
You can try it at proskill.com.au/impact-estimator.
If you have a product where the value shows up over time rather than on the price tag, a tool like this can do a lot of the selling for you. Get in touch and we’ll talk it through.
Lawrence started working in digital in 1998 and has spent half his career building and managing websites and the other half marketing them. Lawrence lives in Doncaster East with his family.